In what appears to be the best science story so far this month, researchers have filmed ants doing the incredible.  Trap-jaw ants (Odontomachus bauri ) can snap their large mandibles shut at 145 miles per hour--2,000 times faster than the blink of an eye. They set a new world record for active speed in the animal kingdom, beating even the lightning-quick tongues of frogs and chameleons.

News@nature has published the highly entertaining videos of these ants propelling themselves in the air by snapping their jaws against the ground, a trick they use to escape predators.  It's really the best thing I've seen since The March of the Penguins.

The people over at BBC News, bless their hearts, are a bit mistaken about the speed of the trap-jaw ants.  They indicate that the jaws shut at "more than 100 km/h (66mph)," which is less than half of the true speed of the ants.  News@nature reports speeds of 65 meters per second, which equals 233 km/h per hour (145 mph), in agreement with National Geographic News and the PNAS study of the ants.

Of course trap-jaw ants use their jaws mainly to battle and catch prey, and therein lies a problem for neo-Darwinian thinking.  Without any prey that can react even close to 145 miles per hour, why would trap-jaw ants need such a fast system? Brian Fisher, entomologist and co-author of the ant study which appears online (subscription only, abstract here, more videos here) today in PNAS, spoke with National Geographic News about this issue:

"It's not like they're trying to catch a cricket that's so fast they need this high speed, so there's a conundrum there," Fisher said.
"Now we've found there's a dual function. It may be that a very important aspect of their life history is escaping from an enemy."

However, it seems highly dubious to me that ants, of all creatures, need to worry about a few casualties, given the average sizes of nests and the rates of reproduction. Ants are the most prolific animal form on earth; why would this particular species need to develop a break-neck escape mechanism?

Also big news: The "Hobbit" skull found in Flores, Indonesia a couple years back and said to be a hominid new species (Homo floresiensis)  turns out to belong a microcephalic Homo sapien after all, according to a new assessment.  The New York Times shows in photo graphics how the two sides of the skull are significantly different, suggesting a malformed head, and other peculiarities of the bones indicate little difference from modern pygmies who inhabit the same island.  National Geographic also has reporting.  Some people are hopping mad over this.

I wrote about the "Hobbit" bones back in April of 2005 when National Geographic featured a model of the "new species" on the cover of its magazine.  Heady assertions from the magazine article, now presumed to be false:

 Had we simply found a modern human stunted by disease or malnutrition? No. The bones looked primitive, and other remains from Liang Bua, which means "cool cave" in the local Manggarai language, showed that this skeleton wasn't unique. It was typical of a whole population of tiny beings who once lived on this remote island. We had discovered a new kind of human.

News again:  Supposed proof of dark matter is announced.